minidv Archives - DVD Conversions

DVCPRO 25 Tape repair and digitisation project

Panasonic DVC PRO first introduced in the mid 90’s was a professional digital tape format used in electronic news gathering and other broadcast applications. Although a very robust format, being tape based, it faces the same issues that all tape formats face.

Temperature and humidity are the two most important factors in ensuring tape longevity. Tapes stored in cold, damp conditions are sure to develop mold and other issues related to incorrect storage.

Moisture causes mold to gather between the tape layers. Because of this, the layers of tape to stick together and if not treated properly will cause the tape to snap during playback.

Pictured is a typical example of a damaged section of tape.

Recently we had a case where a number of DVC PRO 25 tapes had been damaged by mold and moisture.

The customer had taken to the tapes to a reputable media transfer house in New Zealand, the tapes where not treated prior to being inserted into the VTR’s. This resulted in the tapes snapping and being damaged. The transfer house in question returned the tapes to the customer as being “unrecoverable”.

Tape recovery

It is critically important to treat and clean mold damaged tapes prior to them being loaded into VTR’s.

We have perfected various techniques to treat and recover magnetic tape. In the case of the damaged DVCPRO tapes, we opened the cassettes and baked the reels at a constant temperature and humidity level over a prolonged period of time. The baking process extracts residual moisture and helps to release the bonds created by the mold between the layers of tape. We then manually wound every inch of tape onto new take up reels and reassembled the casings.

The result – we managed to recover over 99% of the “unrecoverable” tapes.

Although some sections were lost, it was fortunate that these sections were of little significance. This meant no important material was lost.

Transfer to digital files

Using two different VTR’s and our digital video capture system, we were able to digitise the material and supply the customer with uncompressed MOV and compressed MP4 files.